Exploding Kittens the card game overtakes Ouya’s Kickstarter record with $8 million of funding

Exploding Kittens has earned itself a few believers. Initially, the brainpower at Kickstarter said that the card game about exploding kittens would likely be popular. Just how popular though the game would eventually become was definitely not predicted. While the game might seem a bit strange, and like something that might be more of a gimmick that real thing – it has now amassed more than $8 million in crowd funding, and a game that initially only expected to sell a few thousand decks of cards – has blown every prediction out of the water.

Elan Lee, Shane Small and Matthew Inman, who all had successful ventures and professions before Exploding Kittens was cooked up in their minds – now have entirely different paths than what fate might have dealt them a few years ago. Inman being behind the comedy site Oatmeal, while the other two were developed names at Xbox. The premise of the game is simple – where players simply draw cards until they reach the one that includes an exploding kitten.

Throughout the game there are other cards that have interesting bits of information on them, which give players advantages or disadvantages through shuffling, move skipping and drawing additional cards. However, it’s something that even with as simple as it is, is generating some serious cash in its first official year on the books. The Kickstarter though is now closed, and donations have been capped. The record that it reached was enough for the team to do virtually anything they wanted to do with the branding of Exploding Kittens. Whether it’s a retail push or something entirely different – at the end of the day – this is a move and a game that really is evolving the way people think about card games.

The record was taken away from the hackable console system called Ouya, and will definitely have a serious impact on the way Kickstarter campaigns are viewed. This was a project that admittedly drew attention for the wild idea, and simple concept – but no one thought that it would generate this kind of money, and now a new legend has been born in the Kickstarter world.